4&20 blackbirds

Liz’s Weekly Poetry Series: Pastoral/Anti-Pastoral

At the beginning of this month, on July 4th actually, a poet friend I hadn’t seen in years blew through town on a treasure hunt.

We talked for as long as my kids allowed us, filling in the years. My friend, in discussing his own recent work with translations, described a dampening effect on his tendency toward the anti-pastoral, a dominant theme of his early verse.

Since that delightful encounter I’ve been tinkering with a poem, but it’s a rather cliche rendering of the anti-pastoral I’d like to flee, but can’t. To soften that, I recently picked up a book of poems by Gary Soto, titled a simple plan (Chronicle Books, 2007).

This week’s poetry post, because of neglect, is a twofer: Pastoral/Anti-Pastoral. Enjoy.

*

PASTORAL

The tumbleweed gathers up rumors And rolls out of town. Yanked-up roots are piled beyond the barn, And even now a fly with octagonal eyes Is sipping coolant pooled under the tractor.

“Mr. Goto,” my father-in-law tells me in the yard, “The doctor said he needed more exercise. He got a bike.”

Stars squeeze their icy light, A June bug hisses on the screen door, And a family of possums wades in the cistern. Far east, clouds are throwing lightning on some poor devil.

“Yeah, Mr. Goto, had 40 acres of walnuts,” My father-in-law says. Red coal of his cigarette In the dark, a pause for the chickens to stop their mad fluttering. “He got run over last week. I don’t know about his bike.”

Mid-May. The irrigated cotton rows lit with moonlight. Three months, and the heat will bring us inside. For now, we take to the road on bikes, The Buddhist wheels spinning front and back.

—Gary Soto

*

ANTI-PASTORAL

the anti-pastoral cannot be reversed by our backyard garden

urban chickens in a $500 dollar coop (bought online) their glorious poop and bug hunting efficiency cannot erase what awaits us in the grocery store

where Ginsberg once chased Whitman’s ass along the precipice Amerika built in arrogant disregard of basic natural laws like gravity

the anti-pastoral, says Arlo, means there’s no returning to the milk farm without Walmart lurking somewhere

between the blades of grass

but Farmer’s Market! but Facebook campaigns against GMO’s!

alas, I wear a hipster hat I found at the ironic playground and sip a locally crafted beer sitting on the sandy bank of the Blackfoot contemplating the dead-end of our culture

yes, there is no going back to the milk farm but there is no reason why intentional communities can’t thrive inside big box stores

the crisis of us killing our home traces its poisonous bloom to a crisis of imagination a slow divorce of mind from body

which explains our constant search for reconnection

even though I know there is more than enough hipster irony to feed tomorrow’s anti-pastoral

I’m going to wade into the jolting cold of the Blackfoot river and let its currents pull my floating body toward a deep back-eddy where full submersion will kill the sound of cars

“If our ‘art itself is nature’, post-pastoral literature might be seen as nature’s way of offering us imaginative challenges to conceptions that are leading to our extinction. Each of the six features of post-pastoral literature is a field of urgently needed exploration, raising key questions that are engaged by contemporary science, environmental ethics and cultural geography, for example. Post-pastoral writing provides a mode for integrating and questioning these enquiries in a holistic ‘stretching of our notions of humanity.’ Such writing might be able to nudge us into some ways of answering the most crucial question of our time: what is the right relationship by which people and planet can live together?

But first, the obvious challenge to the contemporary reader of literature that refers to nature in whatever form is to distinguish between the pastoral, the anti-pastoral, and the post-pastoral. Such a reading strategy will help the reader to consider which writing is likely to raise the most useful questions for our time.”

Gifford offers up Gary Snyder as a fine example of post-pastoral poet:

Ripples on the Surface
Gary Snyder, in “No Nature: New and Selected Poems” (1993)

“Ripples on the surface of water
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the sorts of ripples caused by breezes”

A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture.